Ode to a public lands experimenthttp://www.hcn.org/issues/340/16847
It may have lovely photographs, but Valles Caldera: A
Vision for New Mexico’s National Reserve is much more than
just another coffee-table book.This could have been just another coffee-table volume
full of stunning vistas and images of elk grazing in misty valleys.
But by refusing to be yet another pretty book, Valles
Caldera: A Vision for New Mexico’s National
Preserve better serves the preserve’s long history
and complicated beauty.

The preserve’s abbreviated
history goes something like this: About a million years ago,
volcanoes created a giant collapsed caldera. In 1860, Congress
granted the land to the Baca family, and family members and
subsequent owners spent the next 140 years running cattle and
cutting timber. In 2000, Congress bought the 89,000-acre ranch for
$101 million. It was a public-lands experiment: The ranch would be
run by a board of trustees as a for-profit corporation and a
working ranch. Since then, management of the area has become
increasingly complicated — and has often taken bitter turns
— particularly since the original Clinton-appointed board has
been largely replaced by appointees of President Bush.

The book is penned by William DeBuys — a founding, and now
former, trust board member — and photographer Don Usner.
DeBuys unravels the preserve’s history, adding up-to-date
inside information that should appeal both to New Mexicans familiar
with the preserve and to anyone interested in public-lands
management — as well as to those who wonder about the daily
deals made in Washington, D.C., and how they affect local
communities.

Usner, a native northern New Mexican, writes
of what it was like for the public to finally gain a stake in this
land that had so long been private and out of reach. He writes:
“In spite of — or perhaps because of — the dearth
of printed images, the Valles Caldera loomed large in the
imaginations of northern New Mexicans. We took pleasure in
exploring around the edges of the Valles Grande, which is as far as
most of us could get on foot, but we also felt cheated, denied
firsthand knowledge of what was back in the other valles.”

Now, it’s Usner’s turn to tantalize us with
the images he captured while exploring the preserve. The land still
remains mostly off-limits to the public; his images leave us hungry
to finally see it for ourselves.

Valles Caldera: A
Vision for New Mexico’s National Preserve

William DeBuys and Don J. Usner

128 pages,

cloth: $34.95.

Museum of New Mexico Press,
2006.

]]>No publisherGrowth & SustainabilityBooksArticleNew Mexico’s water rebelhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/340/16841
Albuquerque water developer Bill Turner, a board member of
the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, is often described as
the bane of the district as well.

Name: Bill Turner

Fond Childhood Memory: Listening to the Lone
Ranger radio show: “Good will prevail.”

Coffee or Tea: Coffee, black, in a to-go cup
with a few cubes of ice

Resume
Excerpts: Firewall riveter for Navy S2F submarine-hunter
aircraft (1958); Peace Corps volunteer and geologist in Cyprus
(1963-1964); New Mexico natural resources trustee (1995-2003);
trustee of more than five different private companies related to
water rights,environmental projects or hydrology (present). Elected
to board of directors, Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (2005
to present).

Thoughts on the District:
“The (district) will bend and break the law any chance they
get. They won’t go out of their way to do it, but they have a
definite agenda. If the law gets in the way of that agenda, they
get around it.”

A distracted-looking businessman
with thinning gray hair ducks out the back door of the Insurance
Building in downtown Albuquerque. He hops into a red pickup truck,
drives a few blocks, parks and strides into a bank. There, he
deposits a check from a water deal. Next, he heads to a coffee
shop, parking directly beneath a city “No Parking”
sign.

This is Bill Turner, board member and bane of the
Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, which supplies water to the
bulk of New Mexico’s irrigators through a system of ditches
and canals. Since elected to the post in June 2005, Turner has
accused the district of hiring unqualified engineers, shirking its
duties to provide notice of meetings and improperly maintaining its
ditches. He’s openly disagreed with the district’s
chief engineer, attorney and other board members, and his antics
have lured the public into packing more than a few of the
board’s twice-monthly meetings.

During that time,
other board members have censured him and accused him of misleading
journalists and harassing and intimidating employees. Visitors
logging on to mrgcd.com will find a lengthy diatribe from the
district’s attorney, who says Turner is fighting a “war
against agriculture.” Now, the district has accused him of a
conflict of interest, because he runs a number of private companies
that buy and sell water rights. It’s gone beyond
name-calling: The district is suing in state court to kick him off
the board.

That, Turner says, is “malarkey.”
He insists his profession is not the problem: “I was hired to
carry out the wishes of my constituents, which was to clean house
over there. (That’s) what I’m doing,” he says,
“and they don’t like it.”

But
Turner’s profession has raised some genuine ire. As the
middleman in water deals, he’s been known to peddle
irrigation water to developers for $35,000 per acre-foot or more.
And in 2003, he and the Canadian-based Lion’s Gate Water
raised eyebrows — and hackles — by applying to the New
Mexico Office of the State Engineer to buy the 372,982 acre-feet of
water that evaporates off three reservoirs in the Middle Rio Grande
each year.

He has the capital, he says, to divert that
water, store it underground and then distribute it. He even has
interested buyers, he says, including the cities of Albuquerque and
Rio Rancho. But the State Engineer’s Office has rejected his
application; Turner says it “just continually puts obstacles
in the way.” He is appealing the decision in state court,
because he believes his plan is a “win-win” situation.
“The return flow to the river from municipalities is about 50
percent. So by dedicating that water back to the river, you get
in-stream flow, which is help for endangered species, and you also
get more water in the river, which improves the farmers’
water security.”

It’s an unlikely plan, to be
sure. For it to succeed, the irrigation districts currently relying
on water from the three reservoirs would need to revamp their own
systems, build groundwater storage systems and, he says, “use
the irrigation system to recharge the aquifer.”

Whatever happens, both conservationists and agency scientists
— privately, at least — are pleased that someone is
shaking up the system. They may be uncomfortable with his water
deals, but Turner is a welcome break from the “good ol’
boys’ ” network that has controlled irrigation water in
the valley for 80 years. If you ask Turner how one gets to be a
good old boy — overlooking the fact that, as a politically
well-connected 67-year-old man, he may already be one — he
answers with a completely straight face: “By turning your
back, by doing things that may not be quite right, just to get
along.” He then smiles, and takes a bite of a blueberry
scone: “I don’t know how you get to be a good old
boy,” he says. “I’m not a good old boy.”

The author writes from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
This story was funded by a grant from the McCune Charitable
Foundation.

]]>No publisherWaterNew MexicoPoliticsProfilesArticleI fell into a burning ring of firehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/337/16768
There’s nothing like a campfire to soothe and lift
the soulSome people seek gentle hands to soothe knots from
sore muscles. Others get a facial or a pedicure. Still others hold
hands and hum around a vortex. In today’s world of
indulgence-for-hire and guided leisure, you can practice yoga,
Pilates, Nia.

Screw that, I say. Play with fire.

There’s something restorative about lighting a
glowing ring of flame at dusk, and staring into it until long after
darkness has descended. The brain shuts down. The shifting shapes
of sticks and logs collapse the world beyond into darkness. When I
stare at a square foot of fire, then look up into the Western sky,
the world expands. The universe becomes a flood of sudden darkness
speckled with starry fires. It’s a sensation something like
reverse vertigo, and knocks the wind from my lungs.

There
have been so many good fires. There’s the quiet one I’d
hold vigil over alongside my cabin in western Colorado; alone with
my dog, the distant sound of coyotes, and the whirring of
nighthawks, I’d stare at the flames until the day melted
away. Only when the fire began to dim and die would I remember to
look up. Above, all the stars aligned, and the Milky Way scattered
across the sky. Others include October fires in Montana, built to
keep the frost at bay; sputtering flames fighting against monsoon
rains in a New Mexico wilderness; smoky refuges from awkward social
situations at summertime barbecues. You don’t have to make
polite conversation around a bonfire: All you have to do is stare
at it.

No matter how many times I do it, I’m always
surprised by how easy it is to focus on the flames at my feet. In
moments, I forget my career, or the politics of the day, or
whatever happens to be chapping my hide. Fire is undoubtedly
necessary — if not for food or warmth, then for the
restoration of the soul.

Shortly after we moved into our
Albuquerque home two years ago, my husband dug a fire pit in the
backyard. Mostly, we use it for special occasions. But this spring
night, my husband and I are edgy and uncomfortable. It’s been
months since we’ve been to the desert. Or the mountains. Or
anywhere, for that matter. Work demands the same old obligations
from him, and I’m navigating the confusing seas of new
motherhood and interrupted sleep. I step outside after putting our
3-month-old daughter to bed; puttering around the yard is my reward
for making it through the day.

I stare at the empty fire
pit, knowing I should go inside. There are neglected friends to
call, dishes to clean, thank-you cards to write, work to catch up
on, clothes to wash.

That pull doesn’t come,
however. The sky is dark — cloudy for the first time in
weeks, months, maybe — and even my once-spoiled, now
ignored-in-favor-of-the-baby dog eventually abandons me for his
bed.

I dig a batch of newspapers out of the recycling
barrel, figuring I’ll light a few to relieve some stress. I
toss a few sticks onto the flames. Then, the winter’s
firewood pile beckons. Soon, a glow fills the backyard, flickering
orange against the fence. The dog comes back. I remove the sweater
I’d donned. And I’m not sure if it’s the smell of
smoke through the open kitchen window or the glow in the backyard
that beckons him, but my husband emerges like a moth drawn to
flame.

We stare in silence for a while, as the flames
move across the pit, picking up speed, filling the space between
us. That silence becomes less uneasy, less a wall between us and
more a buffer against the outside world. I know my husband well
enough to know that he’s thinking of trout streams. As the
fire burns down, we look up at the sky before heading in. It looks
as though it might actually rain on this drought- stricken city in
which we live.

In the dark morning, when our daughter
wakes to feed, I hear the sound of a gentle rain outside, and smell
the wood smoke in my husband’s hair.

The
author writes from Albuquerque, New
Mexico.

]]>No publisherRecreationEssaysArticleA public-lands experiment needs to re-engage the
publichttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/16772
The writer warns that management of Valles Vidal is
alienating locals and getting off-track Not long ago, a fat patch of
private land lay isolated within the Jemez Mountains, surrounded
mostly by Forest Service land. Though off-limits, many New Mexicans
knew that this place, the Baca Ranch, supported an enormous elk
herd and contained both geological and archaeological wonders.

Today, that 89,000-acre private ranch is better known as
a "public lands experiment." Bought by the federal government in
2000, it's now the Valles Caldera National Preserve -- so named for
the collapsed volcanic dome within its boundaries — and it's
run by a board of trustees appointed by the president. These
trustees are charged with setting policy based on advice from the
public and staff scientists, who are studying everything from elk
herds to stream water quality.

As its founding
legislation states, the trust must protect the preserve's natural
and historic resources, operate as a working ranch and become
financially self-sustaining within 15 years. Those last two
requirements came courtesy of New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici, R, who
opposes any new public lands in the state.

At its
creation, giddy New Mexicans hoped that the land and its resources
would be preserved and that feuding factions would come together in
support of an experiment closely watched by the rest of the nation.
Most of all, we hoped to finally set foot on the land to hunt, ski,
fish, hike, graze cattle, bike, bird watch or just lollygag.

Six years into the experiment, once-feuding factions are
working together. The Valles Caldera Coalition, formed to support
the creation of the preserve, today consists of more than 40
conservation, recreation and ranching groups. But giddiness has
been mostly replaced by disappointment and even bitterness, as
public access has remained minimal. When trustees opened the
preserve this summer for one day only, thousands of people showed
up, jamming traffic and angering many who'd warned that preserve
staff would be overwhelmed by the pent-up demand.

For its
part, the coalition is increasingly frustrated by the trust and its
lack of long-range planning on issues such as recreation, wildlife,
transportation and fire management. But most of all, the coalition
is worried about the trust's dismissive attitude toward the public.
"Who is the trust accountable to?" asks coalition coordinator Marty
Peale. "The public? Domenici and the congressional delegation? Mark
Rey?" (the secretary of Agriculture) "Or the White House?"

Thus far, even though the trust has focused most of its
planning efforts on grazing, relations with local ranchers that
were nurtured by the Bill Clinton-era board have eroded under a new
board appointed by President Bush. Last winter, the chair of the
trust, a rancher herself, announced a new approach to grazing that
would bring in more money, though still not enough money to
generate a profit. The trust had allowed local ranchers such as
those from Jemez and Pojoaque pueblos to graze small numbers of
cattle on the caldera while they worked to restore their
rangelands. The new arrangement ended that deal; instead, an
out-of-state rancher would be invited to graze 1,200 steers on the
preserve. This controversial plan fell apart, but not before
causing bad feelings.

Apparently not learning anything
from the dustup, the trust recently announced that any rancher can
bid for grazing privileges next year, when 2,000 head of cattle
will be allowed to graze the Valles Caldera from June through
September. While it's true that the trust is under pressure to
generate revenue for the preserve, running cattle is not the way to
do it. A 2005 federal report showed that in 2004 alone, the Forest
Service and the Bureau of Land Management lost at least $115
million as a result of their livestock programs. Not only is it
financially unwise, but bringing in large-scale cattle operations
from non-local ranchers also jeopardizes the board's relationship
with northern New Mexicans. And it betrays those who supported
ranching as a way to forge alliances with local communities.

To be fair, the trust is faced with what seems an
impossible task, thanks to Sen. Domenici's insistence on multiple
use and financial sustainability. The preserve is nowhere close to
bringing in more money than it spends. It also needs to welcome
back the public by involving local people in planning what happens
on the land. Bill DeBuys, a writer and former chairman of the
trust, says he presided over the trust's last public meetings,
which were held in 2001.

"In all our public meetings," he
recalls, "people said to us, 'The place is great as it is, so don't
screw it up.' " Five years later, that still seems like good
advice.

Laura Paskus is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). She is a freelance reporter in
Albuquerque, New Mexico.

]]>No publisherGrowth & SustainabilityWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleHave knives and hooks, will travelhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/336/16728
Taos County’s new Mobile Matanza is a rolling
livestock butchering unit that travels to the region’s
far-flung family ranchersName The
Mobile Matanza

She’s sleek, full-figured and
gleaming white, though not exactly sexy. From nose to rear, she
measures a firm 36 feet, all polished metal on the inside. She can
accommodate 10 at a time — 10 animal units, that is —
and she has her own inspection table and, toward the back, an offal
chute.

She’s the Mobile Matanza — a
rolling livestock butchering unit and the pride of Taos County. The
Taos County of skiing Texans and sticker-shock real estate is still
the Taos County of family ranchers, many of whom eke out a living
on fewer than 100 acres, running their cattle on northern New
Mexico’s forests in the summer. Most of them then send their
livestock off to feedlots and slaughterhouses in other states,
where the animals are subsumed into the mass meat market. But the
Taos County Economic Development Corporation would like to change
all that.

With funding from the state, the
corporation’s directors, Pati Martinson and Terrie Bad Hand,
have found a way to bring the butcher to the ranchers and perhaps
the meat to expanding local markets. Beginning this spring, cattle,
pigs, lambs, goats, even bison, will trot up the ramp leading into
the back of the Mobile Matanza, where they’ll be met by Lee
Knox, coordinator of the program.

Grinning boyishly, Knox
shows off the Mobile Matanza. He looks the part of a truck
driver/butcher, with a black cowboy hat that pushes him well beyond
six feet tall, and a wide girth that indicates he’s capable
of wrestling just about any animal reluctant to go to slaughter.

Once Knox has killed and butchered his four-legged
client, an on-site state inspector examines its organs and the
entrails go out the offal chute. From there, the meat is placed in
a room toward the front of the trailer, the doors are closed, and
the next animal is led into the trailer.

It’s a
completely self-contained unit. Knox walks along the passenger side
of the trailer and shows off another room toward the cab of the
truck. Inside is a 300-gallon water tank, a 10-gallon acid wash
tank (apple cider vinegar, he explains), a diesel generator and its
50-gallon fuel cell.

"When we come out to the ranch, the
rancher doesn’t have to provide anything, he doesn’t
have to have water, electricity," says Knox. "I have my own
electricity, own power wash pump, refrigeration unit, hot water
heater — and the diesel generator is sound-enclosed, so
it’s real quiet."

Hopping down from the
driver’s side of an International 9200 truck, Michael, a
rancher from Alcalde dressed in jeans and a gray T-shirt, yells
out: "That’s one fancy rig!"

Michael peppers Knox
with questions as he tries to figure out if the program could work
for him and his herd of 25 mother cows: "What have you guys thought
about the waste?" (Knox favors composting it or working with a
biodiesel producer in Colorado). "Have you figured out prices
already?" (Knox is still comparison-shopping, then factoring in the
cost of gasoline.) "Are you going to have a centralized place to
store (the meat)?" (The development council is building a
cut-and-wrap facility on its grounds and has ordered an enormous
Polar King freezer.)

"Okaaaaay," says Michael.
"That’s what I was worried about, that’s what’s
going to make this ideal."

Another curious rancher,
Erminio Martinez, is clearly impressed by the Matanza. His family
has been ranching for generations — today, he runs cattle and
sheep in Colorado’s San Luis Valley and near Arroyo Seco,
N.M. — and it’s hard, he says, for rural ranchers to
travel 60 to 100 miles to bring their animals to butcher, then to
process and store the meat. "To have local access to the matanza,"
he says, "well, that’s not just good for the private
individuals, it’s good for the community."

The author writes from Albuquerque, New
Mexico.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryCommunitiesColoradoPoliticsProfilesArticleDestruction and discovery walk hand in handhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/335/16701
A new plan to steer energy development away from cultural
sites in New Mexico could streamline energy development, fund
archaeological research and preserve ancient sites all at
onceJust 40 years ago, Navajo families descended from
Arizona’s Black Mesa in horse-drawn wagons. English was
rarely heard, and traditional culture remained largely intact.
Then, in the mid-1960s, a dragline chewed a 60-foot-wide road
across Black Mesa. Peabody Coal Company had come for the vast coal
deposits, bringing with it the modern world.

The dragline
operators weren’t the only invaders. Ahead of the engineers,
miners and machinery, archaeologists came, to survey, excavate and
document the remains of nearly 10,000 years of civilization. David
Phillips was a college student when he joined the crews on Black
Mesa in 1971. "We were exploring ruins no archaeologists had ever
seen before," he says.

Between 1966 and 1983,
archaeologists on Black Mesa discovered thousands of prehistoric
hunting camps, agricultural fields and Puebloan villages, and
historic Navajo settlements. They gathered over a million
artifacts, excavated 225 sites, and gained new understanding of how
centuries- and millennia-old cultures had lived and died. And all
this knowledge came courtesy of the coal mine: Thanks to new
federal laws requiring industry to pay to investigate
archaeological sites in the path of development on public land,
Peabody Coal ended up footing the bill for the country’s
largest archaeological project.

Projects such as the
Black Mesa Mine have exposed resources that would otherwise have
remained unknown and unexcavated, and they have provided much of
the knowledge archaeologists have of the Southwest’s past.

Today, another energy boom is on, with gas wells popping
up all over the West. As in the past, the energy industry has
poured cash into the archaeology business in order to comply with
historic preservation laws. But the piecemeal nature of much of
today’s development — in the form of one-acre well pads
instead of 64,000-acre strip mines — tends to unearth fewer
archaeological treasures.

Down in southeastern New
Mexico, however, federal agencies are working on an innovative new
approach to the relationship between energy and archaeology. They
plan to use technology to steer energy development away from
cultural sites, and to guide the energy industry’s money
toward excavating pristine archaeological remnants. If the approach
works, it could streamline energy development, fuel archaeological
research, and preserve ancient sites, all at once.

"Archaeology thrives on death and destruction. Our basic subject
matter is whatever people leave behind when they die," says
Phillips, who worked as a contract archaeologist for 22 years and
is now a museum curator. "And these days, archaeology’s
biggest source of funding is when traces of ancient destruction are
about to be erased by modern destruction. It’s a fascinating
field, but sometimes you feel like a vulture."

In 1950,
the sometimes challenging partnership between energy and
archaeology was born. El Paso Natural Gas planned to build a series
of pipelines across New Mexico and Arizona, mostly on the Navajo
Reservation, to ship its gas to California. Jesse Nusbaum, an
archaeologist for the National Park Service, knew the project would
destroy hundreds of historic and prehistoric sites, since laws to
protect such resources were rarely enforced at the time. Nusbaum
tried to get the Park Service and Interior Department to stop the
deal, but failed. So he appealed to a friend on the Navajo Tribal
Council, who invited Nusbaum to a meeting with El Paso officials.

He ended up catching a ride to the meeting with the
company’s vice president, and during the 26-mile drive from
Gallup to Window Rock, the two hatched a plan: Nusbaum would drop
his opposition to the pipeline, and El Paso would hire five
archaeologists to excavate sites ahead of construction. The company
would pay a daily stipend and provide equipment and Navajo
laborers. Bulldozers cleared the pipeline’s path at a rate of
five miles per day; archaeologists could work far enough ahead to
have "at least a few days" for salvaging the sites. "Contract
archaeology" had come to the Southwest.

"It was a
historic compromise," says Phillips. "And that was the deal:
Archaeologists didn’t try to preserve anything — they
didn’t think they could. They were given a little bit of
money to run ahead of the pipeline."

----

During that same
era, in the 1950s and early ’60s, the federal government
funded highway and reservoir salvage excavations. With minimal
budgets, universities and museums excavated sites that would have
otherwise been destroyed, chopped up by bulldozers or inundated by
floodwaters. For the most part, researchers simply warehoused the
artifacts, then moved on to the next project; they rarely had
enough funding to write up their finds. Then, in 1966, the year the
Black Mesa project began, Congress passed the National Historic
Preservation Act. In 1970, President Nixon authorized funding for
federal agencies to comply with the act — and the boom was
on. "The network of laws and regulations finally coalesced," says
Dick Chapman, director of the University of New Mexico’s
Office of Contract Archaeology, "and there was the economic need to
have archaeologists going out and doing the business of
compliance."

Thirty-five years after David Phillips
launched his career on Black Mesa, he still nods his head with a
wide-eyed smile when he talks about fieldwork. At first, he says,
he figured he’d do archaeology for five, maybe 10 years,
before he had to get a real job. "Now archaeology is a real job,"
he says. Today, there are about 10,000 people working as contract
archaeologists in the United States, and they account for somewhere
between 70 and 80 percent of professionals in the field. In the
Southwest alone, more than 80 companies do contract work. But the
work involves more than just digging up sites and storing
artifacts. Today’s contract archaeologists usually spend more
time writing reports in the office than squatting with a trowel
over an excavation unit.

With a few exceptions, big
archaeological bonanzas like Black Mesa are a thing of the past. By
and large, today’s contract archaeologists investigate plots
for new post offices, cell phone towers and one-acre oil and gas
wells. Often these small projects can be shifted to avoid obvious
cultural sites, obviating the need for more in-depth excavations.
Energy companies still pay archaeologists to look at their drill
pads and roads, but important new discoveries are few and far
between.

In southeastern New Mexico, where oil and gas
fields are taking over vast tracts of desert and energy development
is expected to quadruple in the next two years, the industry sinks
millions of dollars into cultural resources management to meet its
obligations under the National Historic Preservation Act. Usually,
however, archaeologists simply survey well pad sites that have been
moved so as to avoid historic or prehistoric sites. Meanwhile, rich
cultural sites nearby often go unstudied and unexcavated.

With a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, SRI Foundation, a
nonprofit historic preservation organization, is determined to make
things better for archaeologists as well as the energy industry.
The foundation has come up with a predictive model to help guide
well pads to areas with little likelihood of harboring cultural
resources; energy companies can then develop them without doing any
archaeological work. The energy companies would still pay the same
amount they would have under the old system, but that money would
be used to fund research on more promising sites nearby that are
perhaps unthreatened by energy development.

Bureau of
Land Management officials, using funds from the 2005 Energy Policy
Act, are trying a similar approach. They’ve conducted a large
block survey near Carlsbad to get a big-picture view of a potential
gas field, rather than making the usual acre-by-acre approach.
Using the information they’ve gathered, they can better plan
where the gas wells should go, and where the archaeologists ought
to dig. James Smith, an archaeologist with the BLM in Carlsbad, is
excited about the new approach. "In Carlsbad, we are in the opening
pages of an epic journey that most of the other cultural areas in
the Southwest have already trekked," Smith writes in an e-mail. "We
know so little about the archaeology of southeastern New Mexico
that any new information is significant." Smith is optimistic that
the sites he finds exciting — scatters of stone chips and
chunks of burned rock strewn across sand sheets — may finally
get the attention they deserve.

If these two programs
— currently only in their test stages — are implemented
on a broad scale, they might bring new life to the old relationship
between the energy industry and archaeologists. And they could
revive a bit of the excitement that people like David Phillips felt
as they uncovered Black Mesa’s past more than three decades
ago.

The author writes from
Albuquerque.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryArchaeologyArticleA harvest cornucopia hangs on in New Mexicohttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/16693
The writer celebrates the harvest and community supported
agriculture I hate leaving this party. I
go from person to person, a hug here, a kiss on the cheek there. I
wave goodbye to Farmer Monte and thank him for all the harvests he
has shared this year.

October has always been my favorite
time of year in New Mexico. Part of it is the weather, of course,
clear blue skies, crisp mornings and warm afternoons, the
cottonwoods turning yellow. It's also the smell of roasting chiles
and the taste of green tomatoes picked and fried before frost.

This year is even better than most. Earlier this summer,
my husband and I joined a CSA, which stands for community supported
agriculture. Every other Tuesday, we've picked up locally grown
foods from Los Poblanos Organics, a 12-acre farm in Albuquerque.
Here, Monte Skarsgard grows 75 kinds of fruits, vegetables and
herbs and also distributes produce from other local organic
growers. So this year, Harvest Festival was an intimate experience.
It didn't mean walking past food vendors and chatting with growers
I didn't really know.

While strip malls and suburban
tract housing have reclaimed much of Albuquerque's agricultural
land, this Saturday in late October I am standing on farmland where
gaggles of kids play together, jumping off stumps and chasing one
another around the trees, checking out the irrigation ditches. They
are kin to my daughter; I know they're eating the same avocados and
apples that she loves. And I know there are other people in this
orchard who, like me, have stood in the kitchen, wondering how to
cook beets.

My husband and I do not have expendable
income to blow on fancy food. As subscribers to Los Poblamos, $104
buys us enough produce to last eight weeks, and if need be we could
figure out a work-share arrangement. And I'm no Rachael Ray or
Martha Stewart: I don't even enjoy cooking. I'm only marginally
proficient in the act, and only if there's a detailed recipe to
follow.

To get to Los Poblanos, my daughter and I drive
along a narrow road, lined with cottonwoods. Each time we come, I
place her on the no-longer-moving antique tractor, though we
usually have to wait our turn while the big kids clamber around the
tires or sit on the seat and fiddle with the giant steering wheel.
We peek in on the chickens — they'd been molting — to
see if their feathers are finally coming back. As we walk to the
barn, we say hello to the farm workers, smile at the other members
counting out their produce.

This week there are no more
green tomatoes or pale purple eggplant. As Harvest Festival
signaled, summer is over and we're close to the fall and winter
crops. Today, we pick up a bunch each of edamame, broccoli, and
collard greens; three avocados, a pint of the sweetest cherry
tomatoes I've ever popped into my mouth, garlic, a pound and a half
of potatoes, one bag of seedless grapes, five green apples, a bunch
of carrots and a vacuum-packed bag of roasted and frozen green
chiles. These are the fruits and vegetables we'll eat for the next
two weeks. We say goodbye to the folks in the barn, and I grab a
copy of Farmer Monte's Journal.

As I
drive home, I feel grateful to have found this farm and the
families that support it. Not only because I enjoy the fruits of
its labors, so to speak, but also because the farm has created a
local food economy here in the land of giant grocery chains and
expensive health food stores. As a result, farmers, almost
surrounded now by upscale subdivisions, have been able to preserve
agricultural land along the Rio Grande.

While the
broccoli and garlic sauté in my kitchen, I read what Farmer
Monte had to see about the celebration. It's clear that he's still
wearing that ear-to-ear grin he had on Saturday. After a long, hard
season, he writes, the festival gave him and his staff the "energy
and purpose" to keep doing what they're doing. He continues: "A
child who knows the difference between what tomatoes should and
shouldn't taste like when they are five, will be a force to be
reckoned with when they are 20+ years old ... And after the
festival, I have no doubts that we will all be in good hands."

Across the dinner table, I look at my daughter. She's
cramming eggs into her mouth, avocado is stuck to her chin. Better
eat up, kiddo, I tell her; you've got a lot of work ahead of you.

Laura Paskus is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org).
She lives and freelances in Albuquerque, New
Mexico.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesAgricultureWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleJust another giddyuphttp://www.hcn.org/issues/333/16670
The New Mexico Gay Rodeo Association’s Zia Rodeo
brings out all kinds of cowboys and cowgirlsIt’s a lot like any other rodeo, on an August
weekend in a fairground arena as folks hide out from the monsoon
rains. Friday-night cowboys with mustaches stroll past women
wearing baggy-in-the-seat jeans and plaid flannel shirts. Tall men
with big hats hug one another, catch up on circuit gossip, and
check out newcomers. Pungent blasts of cigarette smoke interrupt
the sweet smell of manure; the riders down Miller Lite in plastic
cups. They’ve all come to the Bernalillo County
Sheriff’s Posse Arena to watch or ride in the New Mexico Gay
Rodeo Association’s Zia Rodeo, one of more than 20 gay rodeos
across the country.

"You can’t be a cowboy if
you’re gay. It’s not possible." Ty, who grew up in
western Nebraska, used to believe that. She started riding horses
when she was 2 and participated in her first rodeo at age 8. When
she was in college, she realized she was gay and dropped out of the
rodeo scene. Then she met someone from the gay rodeo, and found her
way home again. "I was like, ‘Well, hee ha!’ I’ve
been back into it 11 years and I love it."

She’s
one of the 60 or so cowboys and cowgirls who this weekend will
wrestle 600-pound steers out of the bucking chute, ride broncs
bareback and weave half-ton horses gracefully through a series of
poles. When the national anthem plays, the participants take off
their hats, place them over their pearly buttoned shirts and gaze
reverently at Old Glory.

Just another rodeo, in other
words. But underneath the face paint and behind the bandanas, even
the clowns have GQ skin and smiles. Between twangy country tunes
that bellow over the loudspeakers, a contestant talks in detail
about the outfit Christina Aguilera wore during a recent television
appearance.

Punctuating traditional bronc-busting events
are less common contests: In goat dressing, for example, teams work
together to wrestle Jockey underwear onto a goat chained in the
middle of the arena. Then there’s the wild drag race, where
one cowboy and one cowgirl must hoist a drag queen atop a steer and
guide them across the finish line.

Keenan’s one of
the contestants. A flight attendant by trade, he is tall,
fastidious, and terribly mischievous. When I ask if protesters ever
crash gay rodeos, he replies, "Well, sometimes PETA will show up."
He’s distracted by the goodies in the registration packet: a
rodeo number, safety pins and a T-shirt, along with condoms and
information about HIV testing. "But sometimes, like in Las Vegas,
they’re just given their own area to protest in." I pursue
the question: Do anti-gay protesters ever appear? Is there ever a
threat of violence? "Oh, please," says Jeff from Tucson, listening
in. He points around the tent: "Look at these boys. They know how
to kick ass."

The author writes from
Albuquerque, N.M., where she wrangles bantam chickens in her
backyard.

]]>No publisherRecreationEssaysArticleWastin' away in New Mexicohttp://www.hcn.org/issues/332/16628
Louisiana Energy Services, a European-based company,
breaks ground on the first uranium enrichment facility in the U.S.
near Eunice, N.M.Since the first
atomic bomb was developed and detonated in New Mexico, the nuclear
industry has been drawn to the state, which today is home to two
weapons labs and the nation’s only nuclear waste dump. Now,
on a stretch of land in the southeast corner on the Texas border,
an international company is building the first uranium enrichment
facility in the nation. It’s the first commercial nuclear
facility to receive a license in 30 years, and it’s a sign
that the so-called nuclear renaissance is more than just hype.

At the end of August, Louisiana Energy Services (LES),
owned by the European consortium URENCO, began construction on its
plant, modeled on facilities in Europe. When it opens in late 2008
or early 2009, the National Enrichment Facility will use thousands
of centrifuges to spin uranium hexafluoride, separating uranium 235
isotopes to make fuel rods for the nation’s nuclear power
plants. "We’ve had contracts for several years, and we have
delivery dates in 2009," says Marshall Cohen, the company’s
executive vice president for public affairs and public policy.
Today, 20 percent of the nation’s electricity comes from
nuclear reactors, and less than 10 percent of the fuel is produced
within the country. "That by itself is not good," Cohen says. "We
are more dependent on uranium from overseas than oil."

Local officials are thrilled: The facility will bring 1,000
construction jobs and later, 300 full-time and contract jobs. In
the past few decades, southern New Mexico has subsisted almost
entirely on the boom-and-bust oil and gas industry, and lawmakers
are eager to diversify the economy.

"I don’t think
there could be anything much better for the east side (of New
Mexico) — which already has potash and oil and gas —
(than becoming) a sprawling center for different kinds of nuclear
activity," said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., at a Sept. 5 press
conference. Domenici, who wooed LES to his state, now wants more
nuclear facilities to join them. But the radioactive waste produced
by the nuclear fuel cycle won’t just go away, and could
hinder Domenici’s ambitions.

State left
out

Gov. Bill Richardson, D, wasn’t too thrilled
about being stuck with the plant’s low-level radioactive
waste, depleted uranium. And when the state’s attorney
general, Patricia Madrid, was barred from full participation in the
enrichment facility’s licensing hearing due to new
anti-terrorism measures, Richardson threatened to withhold support
for the plant.

Six months later, however, in June 2005,
Gov. Richardson and Attorney General Madrid announced that they had
reached an agreement with LES allowing the facility to store about
5,000 12-ton cylinders of depleted uranium — about eight
years’ worth of waste — on site for 15 years. In
return, LES will "maintain financial assurance" to guarantee
disposal of the waste, and will not dispose of waste in New Mexico,
nor build a "deconversion" or treatment facility in the state.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission objected to this
settlement, citing "two fundamental flaws": It was negotiated and
signed without input from the federal government, and its agreement
concerning inspections and compliance is unenforceable. Under
federal law, states lack authority to inspect nuclear facilities
and cannot enforce nuclear waste regulations.

But Cohen
says his company regards the settlement as "legally binding." The
company’s next step is to build the nation’s first
commercial deconversion plant — and they’ll honor
Richardson’s conditions by putting it just across the border
in Texas. That plant, says Cohen, will "take the material out of
our facility (and) separate it into hydrogen fluoride and very low
level uranium oxide, which is very easily disposed of in the U.S."

Without the deconversion plant, the U.S. Department of
Energy — which currently has a backlog of 704,000 metric tons
of depleted uranium — would become legally responsible for
the waste. Other options for moving the waste out of New Mexico,
according to LES, include shipping it to Canada, Europe or perhaps
Kazakhstan.

Third time’s a
charm

But LES hasn’t come up with "plausible or
economic" ways to dispose of the waste or to protect the
environment and public health, nor has it realistically assessed
the plant’s decontamination costs, says Michael Mariotte,
executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Nuclear
Information and Resource Service.

The nonprofit group has
been fighting LES since 1989, and Mariotte is puzzled as to why New
Mexicans have so eagerly embraced the company. When LES proposed
facilities, first near Homer, La., and then near Hartsville, Tenn.,
the local communities — both predominately poor and
African-American — opposed those plans. Eventually, state
lawmakers backed the communities, and the company withdrew its
proposals. In August 2003, LES announced it was abandoning its
plans in Tennessee, and planned instead to come to New Mexico
— at the request of Sen. Domenici and with promises of state
tax incentives.

"Civic leaders aren’t understanding
that there will be very few permanent jobs (that eastern New
Mexicans are qualified for)," says Mariotte. "The people in
Louisiana and Tennessee came to understand that the higher-paying
jobs would be taken by the Europeans who already know how to
operate the plant."

Cohen acknowledges his company had
problems in the past with finding a site. In Louisiana, for
instance, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Atomic Safety
and Licensing Board rejected the company’s license, citing
environmental justice issues. "We’re determined to not let
that happen again," he says. "We’re going to do it right."
The facility is safe and efficient, he says, and the time is ripe
for domestic uranium development. "This country is coming to
realize that (nuclear power) is a good source of electricity, and
it doesn’t produce anything that contributes to global
warming."

Meanwhile, construction is under way near
Eunice: Workers are erecting perimeter fences and pouring concrete
pads. And according to Wes Reeves, spokesman for Xcel Energy in
Amarillo, the company is already ramping up power to the site. By
the spring of 2008, Xcel will be sending the facility about 32
megawatts of electricity — enough to power more than 10,000
homes — from its coal-fired and natural gas power plants in
Texas and eastern New Mexico.

From a Natural Resources Defense attorney turned Yale law professor, the book is part memoir, part manifesto. And considering the potentially boring topic, Schoenbrod does an excellent job of explaining how laws such as the Clean Air Act came into being, what’s happened to them in the past 35 years, and how they could be more effective.

According to Schoenbrod, when Congress created the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it gave the agency an extraordinary amount of responsibility, but very little power. He cites lead as an example: "Only by delegating their lawmaking responsibilities to the EPA could legislators take credit with voters for protecting health yet curry favor with the corporations that put lead in gasoline." The entire system would work better if those who set policy were accountable to the public, he says; that’s why lawmakers, rather than agency bureaucrats or political appointees, should be responsible for environmental policy.

Rather than delving into the Bush administration, Schoenbrod takes a long view of the agency — and his often-surprising perspectives prevent this book from becoming a Red versus Blue look at environmental protection. He explains why the agency relies more often on politics rather than science in its policy-making (because the science of describing risk is so uncertain, political decisions are easier to make than those based on science).

What keeps this book from becoming a rant is Schoenbrod’s basic optimism: In the end, it will be ordinary people, holding their lawmakers accountable, who protect the environment.

]]>No publisherPoliticsBooksArticleOnline: No more talking headshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/331/16595
Jennifer Napier-Pearce uses her own money to produce a
Salt Lake City-based podcast called Inside
UtahJennifer Napier-Pearce, who runs the Salt Lake City-based podcast Inside Utah, calls audio recordings "the theatre of the mind." Combine that with the "magic of the Internet, Google and iTunes" — which allow you to search for content, then listen to whatever strikes your fancy — and it’s "TiVo for your radio," she says.

Each week, 800 to 1,000 people download Napier-Pearce’s 30-minute podcasts about what’s up in the Beehive State. "That’s pretty good," she says, "but it’s not NASA." Then again, NASA, which averages 327 million Web "hits" weekly, has a $16 billion annual budget, while Napier-Pearce, a former news director at public radio station KCPW and self-described middle-aged mother of two, pays for Inside Utah out of her own pocket.

"I wanted to do a show with more time to do interviews, to get different voices," she says. "In the traditional media, we tend to talk to the same people." She still relies on her old rolodex, full of tried and true sources, but now she has the time to hit the streets, seeking new sources with different perspectives: "I try to keep my eyes open, in my neighborhood, in Salt Lake, and a lot of people come to me (with story ideas)," she says. "Grassroots is where you get your good ideas." Her stories roam from tax policy, to the Mormon Church, to a father-son team of bicyclists competing in the Tour of Utah.

Podcasting is the future of radio, she says. And anyone can do it. "You don’t have to be a rocket scientist — you can put it out there and see what happens."

Laura Paskus is HCN’s Southwest Correspondent.

Get the Beehive State buzz at insideutah.com, or e-mail Jennifer Napier-Pearce at jnpearce@insideutah.com.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesArticleOnline: Web watchdoghttp://www.hcn.org/issues/331/16594
Dave Frazier started the online Boise
Guardian in order to keep an eye on local government and
rile his fellow citizensFour years ago, Dave Frazier spent a whole summer in court, suing Boise over the city council’s decision to build an $18 million police station without putting it to a vote. At first, he represented himself, but later he hired an attorney — and eventually, he won. Three years later, says Frazier, the city tried the same stunt with a proposed $27 million parking garage. Again, Frazier hauled the city into court, where he won again, this time in the Idaho Supreme Court.

Now, he’s found a new way to be a thorn in the side of local government, and at the same time rile the natives: He started the online Boise Guardian. "I couldn’t get the city council to listen to me," says Frazier. "I’d get my three minutes. They’d say, ‘Thank you,’ and go on with their business."

Frazier, a 60-year-old photographer, professes "some type of neutrality." "I’m a radical middle-of-the-roader, though a lot say my views are libertarian in nature," he says. "I want the people to vote, and I’m rabidly anti-growth."

Since starting the Guardian in 2005, he’s revealed the city’s misuse of federal farm subsidies, and a developer’s plans to co-opt five acres of state highway department land east of Boise for access to a new subdivision. He’s kvetched about using state tax incentives to lure a Hawaii-based manufacturer to build a solar panel plant along the Snake River, and he’s helped fuel rumors that a local developer plans to send run-off from condos into a local park. He regularly posts transcripts of calls that Boise residents make to complain to the mayor.

Frazier considers the Guardian a news site, but he writes in the style of the perturbed and maniacal blogger. A newcomer to the site could use a glossary: "Lame Duck Guv" is Frazierese for Idaho Gov. Jim Risch; when someone has "cajones," it means he did the right thing; and when Frazier asks, "Who’s your daddy?" it means he has been proven right about something.

And then there’s Frazier’s "Dope Awards," an honor given to local reporters nominated by readers. One recently went to Alyson Outen of KTVB, for broadcasting live from the station roof during a severe thunderstorm warning. Frazier later added: "A second GUARDIAN reader… offered a ‘common sense’ award to Rick Lantz (the station’s weatherman) who ‘ordered’ Alyson off the roof. Nice job Rick. Those meteorologist academy classes paid off."

By stirring up local politics — and raising Cain about government "irregularities" — Frazier seeks to keep lawmakers on their toes. People are eager to pass on information, he says: "One thing I’ve learned is everyone has something for you to check out." He gets tips from local attorneys, "people in local government who could not go on the record, ever," and readers who check the site regularly, post comments or drop him e-mails — "good citizens," he calls them all.

In a July 3 post concerning farm subsidy misuse on the 2,300-acre farm run by Boise’s public works department (one of his "poop farm stories," as Frazier calls them, because the farm is fertilized with biosolids from the city’s wastewater treatment facilities) he credits his readers with breaking the "real" story: "The information was included in a Washington Post story detailing the out of control spending by the U.S. Department of Agriculture nationwide. A Boise mainstream paper printed the Post story Monday, but it took a GUARDIAN reader to do the real LOCAL reporting."

To get Frazier’s "different slant on the news," go to boiseguardian.com.

]]>No publisherGrowth & SustainabilityIdahoCommunitiesPoliticsArticleNavajos pay for industry's mistakeshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/329/16521
The federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was
created to compensate uranium miners and mill workers sickened by
their jobs, but on the Navajo Reservation, Dr. Bruce Baird
Struminger says the program has proved flawedDr. Bruce Baird Struminger spends his workdays screening Navajo uranium workers who believe their jobs have made them sick. After four years, he can predict how most will react to getting a clean bill of health: "When we find out someone’s lungs are in great shape, some are happy," he says. "But most are not (because) they’re not going to get any compensation."

Struminger is the medical director of the federal Radiation Exposure Screening and Education Program on the Navajo Reservation. He’s talking about the federal program that provides compensation to people with radiation-caused lung cancer or pulmonary fibrosis.

In 1990, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) and established screening programs in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. RECA compensates those who can prove they are sick because of their work in the uranium mines and mills between 1947 and 1971, when the U.S. government was the sole purchaser of uranium for nuclear bombs and reactors. It also compensates sick "downwinders" who lived in certain parts of Utah, Arizona or Nevada during nuclear bomb tests in the Nevada desert in the 1950s and ’60s.

So far, the U.S. Department of Justice has paid 16,022 RECA claims, each worth $150,000 plus related medical expenses. Just over 1,000 of them have gone to Navajo uranium workers or their widows; about 4,000 Navajos worked in the uranium industry prior to 1971. Another law provides an additional $250,000 in workmen’s compensation to sick workers.

Together, these two compensation programs have created something of a rush on the reservation. "It’s an awkward and awful situation," says Struminger, who this summer announced his resignation from his Shiprock-based post. The doctor has screened more than 1,750 patients — most of them two or three times each. His patients are almost always men, many of them now elderly. "The whole system is set up so that people are hoping to find something (in their lungs) that’s not good."

Though he finds the RECA program flawed, Struminger does believe it is an honest attempt to rectify past mistakes. But for people like George Brown or William Lopez, the program has come up short. Both men worked in the Tuba City uranium mill and today suffer from health problems. Their illnesses, however, don’t qualify for compensation. Still, they — along with many others who worked in or lived near the mines and mills — wonder if those health problems are related to the uranium industry.

"It’s a huge burden, that people worry about their health," Struminger says. Miners and millers, and their families, become convinced that they suffer from lingering illnesses that Struminger can’t discover. "There is this perception that it did affect them," he says. "We help them understand which of their ailments are related to uranium."

Brown, for his part, is frustrated. "We’re just like a time bomb, I guess," he says. Like many other former workers, he has given up on the RECA screening — "too much red tape." He believes uranium workers should be compensated based on how many years they worked, period: "I wish that they would say, ‘You worked so many years, you were exposed, and we don’t know what the future holds for you.’ "

This story is a sidebar to the feature:

With global warming an increasing threat, some are urging a return to nuclear energy, but the industry’s own checkered past reminds us that a nuclear renaissance will be neither easy nor cheap

]]>No publisherEnergy & Industry2006/09/24 16:25:00 GMT-6ArticleDuke City dustuphttp://www.hcn.org/issues/330/16545
The nation may be intrigued by the contest between
incumbent Republican Rep. Heather Wilson and New Mexico Attorney
General Patricia Madrid, but the New Mexicans who will actually
vote in the election seem fairly disinterested.Voters in New Mexico’s first district, which encompasses Albuquerque, are mostly Democrats, but they’ve sent Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives since 1969. Now, New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid, a Democrat, has a decent chance of unseating Republican incumbent Rep. Heather Wilson. Although the potential upset has drawn national attention, New Mexicans don’t seem thrilled with either candidate.

Wilson has served the district since 1998, voting in near lockstep with President Bush, New Mexico’s senior senator, Pete Domenici, R, and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. A graduate of the Air Force Academy, Wilson supports the war in Iraq, as well as the state’s nuclear weapons and oil and gas industries. Madrid, meanwhile, a New Mexico native who was the state’s first female district court judge, favors increasing the minimum wage, preventing the privatization of Social Security, and establishing a timeline to withdraw troops from Iraq.

In spite of strong support from their respective party loyalists, both women carry baggage that may keep pivotal undecided voters away from the polls. While Wilson calls herself an "independent" Republican, her loyalty to the president and Republican leadership may hurt her, as Bush’s approval rating in the state is at 38 percent. Wilson has also received campaign money from scandal-ridden lobbyist Jack Abramoff; earlier this year, she donated it to the Boy Scouts.

Meanwhile, former state treasurer Robert Vigil and his predecessor, Michael Montoya, are under federal indictment for corruption and extortion that occurred on Attorney General Madrid’s watch. Wilson’s campaign has jumped on the connection, running television ads claiming that Madrid’s office ignored a whistleblower’s attempts to expose the problems. A former state employee, Harold Field — an appointee of New Mexico’s former Republican governor — claims he sent a letter asking for an investigation into the treasurer’s office. Madrid’s office denies ever receiving the letter.

As contributions pour in from around the country — the two candidates have raised more than $4.7 million total, with Wilson ahead by about a million — the race continues to tighten. "Heather Wilson won her last three elections by a comfortable margin," says Brian Sanderoff, president of Albuquerque-based Research Polling Inc. "I don’t want to overstate this, but this one will be closer than the ones in the past." In early September, Wilson was leading Madrid in the polls, 45 to 42 percent, with 10 percent of voters still undecided.

In mid-August, Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., showed up at an Albuquerque campaign rally to support Madrid, and said that it would be "hard to find a district in this country that’s more a symbol (of the need for change) than this district." Outside the rally, four protesters milled around with signs reading "Madrid + Power = corruption in SF" and "Liberals weak on defense."

Beyond raising money and their national profiles, Wilson and Madrid have a bigger question to ask themselves, says Jaime Chávez with the nonpartisan Southwest Voters Registration Education Project: "Is there going to be enough excitement in this race to draw people out?" He adds, "It’s a down and dirty fight, but how strong is (each of) their connections to the constituency base?"

The author is HCN’s Southwest correspondent.

This story was funded by a grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation.

]]>No publisherPoliticsArticleNavajo Windfallhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/329/16520
The Navajo Nation is fighting to keep uranium mining off
the reservation, but eager uranium companies are determined to
mine– and the federal government is on their sideUranium companies anticipate tomorrow’s profits, while yesterday’s workers await compensation

"There were lights, like carnival lights, all over the mesas from the companies doing their explorations," says Rita Capitan, a diminutive, soft-spoken Navajo woman who introduces herself as a member of the Sagebrush and Towering House clans. During the uranium boom of the 1970s, she and her husband, Mitchell, were still in high school. "They just walked all over us, and then, when the price of uranium went down — like ants that come and go all of a sudden — they were all gone the next day."

For more than 30 years, beginning in 1950, the uranium industry colonized the 17 million-acre reservation, which stretches across northern Arizona into Utah and New Mexico. Thousands of Navajos worked in the mines and mills, breathing radioactive dust. Today, many of those workers suffer from lung cancer and respiratory diseases such as pulmonary fibrosis. Uranium, in Navajo lore, has been added to the list of sleeping giants that shouldn’t be disturbed.

So when, nearly 20 years ago, a small mining company proposed revitalizing the uranium industry on the reservation, Navajo tribal members and officials fought the idea at every turn. Last April, in a last-ditch attempt to keep the industry out, the Navajo Nation banned all uranium mining on the reservation.

But it may not matter: Hydro Resources Inc., with the endorsement of the federal U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is poised to open four uranium mines — three of them on Navajo land — near Crownpoint and Church Rock, about an hour’s drive from Gallup. And with uranium prices soaring, other companies have their eyes on the reservation’s roughly 100 million pounds of uranium deposits. They’re keeping close tabs on this fight between the tribe and the federal government, waiting to see whose law really reigns in Indian Country.

With claims being staked on uranium properties from Wyoming to New Mexico, the implications of this battle’s outcome could spread across the West. "This is a test case for (mining companies)," says Eric Jantz, an attorney with the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, which represents activists who oppose the mines. "Can they push around the community?"

A hard fight

Hydro Resources’ proposal is for "in situ" leach mining, in which miners inject water underground and use chemicals ranging from bicarbonate of soda to hydrochloric acid to leach out the ore, rather than tunneling into the earth to reach it as they did in the past. The uranium is then removed from the resulting sludge, and the water returned to the underground aquifer. This process is much safer and means there’s little danger that workers will develop the kind of diseases that sickened them in droves during the last boom. "Look, with underground mining, you’re moving tons of rock," says Tom Ehrlich, chief financial officer of Uranium Resources Inc., the parent company of Hydro Resources. "Just think about what you’re moving and then sending to the mill. With solution mining, you’re moving water."

That’s exactly what worries Navajo activists like Mitchell Capitan, who worked for Mobil Oil on an in situ pilot project in the 1980s. In situ mining’s effects on groundwater remain dubious at best: In southeastern Texas, for example, residents say the Kingsville Dome and Rosita in situ plants have contaminated private wells. But because no groundwater or well data exists from before the facility’s construction, the claims can’t be verified. The Beverly Mine in Australia has had both above- and below-ground leaks, including one spill of 15,000 gallons of sulfuric acid, radioactive liquids and salty water. At the Highland mine in Wyoming, spills containing uranium have ranged from just a few gallons to more than 5,000.

This checkered history, combined with the fact that the in situ proposal would draw from uranium deposits beneath the local drinking water aquifer, inspired the Capitans to found Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining (ENDAUM) from their Crownpoint home in 1994. Needing help, they contacted Chris Shuey, with the Albuquerque-based Southwest Research and Information Council.

"We’ve spent well over $2 million fighting this," says a fast-talking Shuey. The six-shelf bookcase in the dingy office groans with three-ring binders; there are piles of court briefs, health studies, groundwater models and federal nuclear regulations everywhere. The group has hired attorneys, monitored radiation and air quality at uranium sites on the reservation, and sued New Mexico to tighten its uranium groundwater standard.

Last April, the activists received official support: In a 63 to 19 vote, the tribal council passed the Diné Natural Resources Protection Act of 2005, banning uranium mining and milling on the reservation. President Joe Shirley Jr. even issued an executive order last fall prohibiting tribal members from negotiating with uranium companies.

But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which licenses nuclear facilities and uranium processing projects, has rejected all but one of the opposition’s claims and ignored the tribe’s ban during the appeals process. The NRC continues to stand by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which dictated that the federal government — not tribes, not states and not landowners — will have the final say on uranium processing and radioactive waste disposal.

Shuey doesn’t seem surprised: "We didn’t go into this with rose-colored glasses," he says. "The NRC lends notorious support to industry." Despite the long, exhausting, and expensive struggle, the opposition has barely influenced the mining proposal: "I don’t know what else I’d tell (other communities) in the same situation," Shuey says. "We couldn’t have ignored the NRC, because the company would be out there already."

The battle may be lost

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has repeatedly ruled that Hydro Resources’ proposal is safe for people and the environment. In 1998, the commission granted the company a license to begin mining at the four sites. The various appeals have delayed the process until now, but, according to NRC spokesman Dave McIntyre, it’s drawing to an end. "Once the Commission has issued its final rulings, and the staff and Hydro Resources have complied with the requirements," he says, "the license will become valid from NRC’s point of view." That’s expected to happen by next year.

The company will still have to jump through a few state and federal hoops. But once the NRC license goes through, it’s unlikely the Navajos can stop the mines from opening on their reservation.

Of course the fight could land in federal court; once the NRC approves the license, the tribe or activists could sue, although extensive litigation is beyond either group’s budget. But the courts could go either way: If the Navajos tried to enforce their ban and stop Hydro Resources’ project, the mining company could sue the tribe in return. Either way, it doesn’t look good for the Navajos, says J.D. Williams, an Oregon-based tribal attorney who specializes in energy issues. "After 16 years of Reagan and Bush (appointments), the federal courts have been stocked with Republican judges that are hostile to tribal jurisdiction and (rule) favorably for state jurisdiction," he says. "Usually, tribes lose these days."

There’s still hope for the tribe, however. For all the bluster behind the uranium rush, not much has actually happened. In western Colorado, a mine re-opened last year amid great fanfare to cash in on high uranium prices (HCN, 6/13/05: Uranium miners go back underground). Within months, it was shuttered again, its newly hired workers looking for jobs elsewhere. The economics just didn’t add up.

The author is HCN’s Southwest correspondent.

This story was funded by a grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation.